When they volunteered just a few months before Christmas, 1914, the young men were filled with enthusiasm and patriotic fervor.  The ancient battlefields of Western Europe had been silent since the end of the Franco-Prussian War, the conflict that forever changed the face of Europe 43 years earlier.  Even that hugely consequential war had been a short one.  Its guns fell silent after only 10 months of fighting.

 

Now, five months after fighting commenced again, few who volunteered the previous summer had any illusions of swift victory.  By September, the battlefront had stabilized along a 500 mile network of trenches stretching from the North Sea coast of Belgium all the way to Switzerland.  Millions of men faced each other on the front, sometimes only 50 or 60 yards separating enemy lines.

 

By the first Christmas of the war, the body count had already reached nearly 1 million.  Names and locations of obscure hamlets in far off places were now known all over the world, but not for reasons their residents would have wished.  Their names had become synonymous with unimaginable death and destruction.  Names like “Marne” and “Ypres” and “Tannenberg”, the scenes of the first great battles of the Great War, would forever serve to remind men and women of the tragic futility of the war now raging.

 

After so much killing, reinforced by propaganda describing the murderous intent of the savage Huns across the way, it must have come as a surprise to French and British soldiers to see flickering candles illuminating small Christmas trees along the German trenches.  In the silence of the frigid night, Scotsmen listened with astonishment as their enemies began to sing.  For months they had only heard the blast of gunfire from behind the German lines; now it was replaced with the gentle sound of music.  They might not have known the lyrics, but they certainly knew the tune, as French and British alike listened to the old Tyrolean carol:

 

Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!

Alles schlaeft, einsam wacht

Nur das traute heilige Paar.

Holder Knab in lockigen Haar,

Schlaf in himmlicher Ruh!

Schlaf in himmlicher Ruh!

 

Soon, Scottish soldiers joined in, and the Germans fell silent, listening just as their adversaries had a minute earlier:

 

Silent night, holy night!

All is calm, all is bright.

Round yon virgin, mother and child,

Holy infant, so tender and mild,

Sleep in heavenly peace!

Sleep in heavenly peace!

 

Before long, the French began singing several hundred yards away.  Shouts of “Merry Christmas”, and “Frohe Weihnachten”, and “Joyeux Noel” wafted across No Man’s Land, its lifeless surface littered with shrapnel and the human detritus of war. 

 

In one sector, Germans who knew fleeting English found large signboards and wrote the words “YOU NO FIGHT, WE NO FIGHT”.   British and French soldiers found signboards of their own and wrote “MERRY CHRISTMAS” and “JOYEUX NOEL” in large block letters. 

 

A spontaneous truce developed nearly the entire length of the Western Front.  Officers from each side agreed to clear No Man’s Land of the many bodies that lay in varying states of degradation.  Once that grim task was complete, the opposing forces cautiously began mingling, even exchanging small gifts, like tobacco and candy and other rations.  A British officer offered a pack of cigarettes to a German officer.  The German asked, “Virginian?”  “Aye”, came the answer in a strong Scottish brogue, “Straight cut.”  “Nein, danke”, replied the German.  “Nur aus der Tuerkei fuer mich.”  The British troops nearby let out a hearty laugh when they realized the German only smoked Turkish cigarettes.

 

A group of Germans from Saxony found an old Fussball and challenged their English counterparts to a game, Saxon versus Anglo-Saxon, in a frozen field pocked with the craters of No Man's Land.  After the game, a young man from Dresden thanked his English competitors for a game well played.  When the British soldiers marvelled at his perfect English, he explained that he had worked several years as a bellman at a London hotel, and had only returned to Germany when hostilities seemed imminent.  Now he regretted that decision, believing he had more in common with the Anglo-Saxons he was fighting than with the Prussian officers under whose command he fought.  Similar stories abounded along the entire front.

 

The Christmas truce of 1914 lasted anywhere from a single afternoon, to as much as a few weeks in some places.  Protestant chaplains led bilingual church services; Catholics held services in Latin for anyone who wished to attend.  A German officer led a young French private behind the German lines and gave him a fine bottle of champagne, taken months before during the early advance through France.  A barber set up a chair in no man’s land, offering haircuts to Germans, French, and Brits alike.

 

Once word of the truce reached military commanders on both sides, they demanded its end and a resumption of hostilities.  In some cases, soldiers simply fired their guns into the air, trying to extend the peace as long as possible.  Eventually, however, fighting resumed, even exceeding the ferocity of the battles that had taken place prior to Christmas.

 

Later attempts to reach an unofficial Christmas truce largely failed.  There were a few cases of fraternization between French and German forces on Christmas, 1915, but nothing like the widespread cessation of hostilities that had taken place the year before.  Parts of the Eastern front experienced a short Easter truce in 1915.  To prevent a repeat of the truce of 1914, commanders on both sides ordered large scale artillery bombardments on subsequent Christmas Eves.  Troops were regularly rotated to different sectors of the front, to prevent soldiers from becoming overly familiar and friendly with the men on the other side. 

 

The last known survivor of the Christmas truce was a British soldier named Alfred Anderson, who died in November 2005 at the age of 109.  In an interview with The Observer less than a year before his death, Mr. Anderson described the events of that Christmas day:

 

       I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence…All I had

       heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking,

       and whining of bullets in flight, machinegun fire and distant

       German voices.  But there was a dead silence that morning,

       right across the land as far as you could see.  We shouted

       “Merry Christmas,” even though nobody felt merry…It was

       a short peace in a terrible war.

 

Mr. Anderson might not have felt very merry, but he lay down his gun to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace.  "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God," said Jesus.  For a brief moment at the close of 1914, Alfred Anderson and a million men on either side of the front became children of God.  Blessed were they then, and blessed as well are today's peacemakers, wherever they are.  Blessed are they, and blessed are those who benefit from the bravery of true children of God.